April 22, 2005

Another sex-abuse lawsuit has been filed against the Dubuque Catholic Archdiocese. An Indiana woman says she attended St. John's school in Waterloo in the early 1960s and this week she filed a civil complaint in federal court in Cedar Rapids outlining details of her abuse by a priest there. Steve Theisen is a co-founder of the local chapter of SNAP, the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests. When one survivor comes forward, he says it gives strength to the next one who might be considering it, and in this case Theisen says it'll help women, since "not just young boys were abused, but also young girls." The complaint says the woman told a nun at the school what was happening, and her parents went to police. She charges that church officials visited them at home and threatened to excommunicate the girl and her family if they told anyone of the abuse.